So what I found out through testing was that we needed ActiveSync installed on the workstations that I'm trying to run my program on.  The problem with this is that it's going to be used by many people and no way of knowing if they have it installed or not.  Is there any possible way that I could have it run without installing ActiveSync?  Possibly packaging some other dlls with it or something like that?  What are the dlls that the OpenNetCF dll is looking for?

You have to install ActiveSync and there is no getting around that. The DLL that Desktop Communication is looking for is rapi.dll, but you cannot simply distribute rapi.dll with your application. The EULA for ActiveSync prohibits this and it is not available as a separate DLL from Microsoft. 

Figures.  So I'm assuming since it uses the RAPI.dll I wouldn't be able to manually right the calls since I would still need RAPI.dll?

That's right. And since you would need RAPI.dll, you would need to install ActiveSync... or implement your own, interface-compatible version of RAPI (not a task to be taken lightly).

Is there any way to at least get my app to load even though the RAPI.dll isn't found?  The PDA downloading is only part of the program and if they don't have ActiveSync installed I'd like for them to at least be able to get the program to load up.

Yeah, there is a way. There's a number of ways. The easiest is to check that rapi.dll exists in %WINDIR%\System32\ before you  instantiate any classes from Desktop Communication library.

 Since I'm doing "Imports OpenNETCF.Desktop.Communication" in VB.net I wasn't aware that that was possible.  It's throwing an InvalidOperationException as soon as the program tries to load up.

The Desktop Communication library will not attempt to load rapi.dll until you create an instance of the OpenNETCF.Desktop.Communication.RAPI class.

The Imports directive is just a way of telling the compiler that you're going to use types defined in a particular namespace so that you don't have to explicitly qualify each type reference with its full namespace.

You likely have an instance of a RAPI class being created in a constructor or during class initialization of something created at startup.  You need to move that instantiation into code where you can wrap it with a try/catch.

 

 Wow I'm dumb.  I was declaring a new RAPI variable before the form loaded.  I just moved it down into the form load section and now I can check for the dll.  Thanks.

 

EDIT:  @ ctacke.  Yeah you hit it right on the head.